Curiosity may play a greater role in people’s capacity to achieve things than ambition does. Quoting Alexender Grothendieck’sRecoltes et Semailles:
In the Promenade, and here and there in Récoltes et Semailles I will be speaking of the nature of mathematical work. It is work that I understand very well from first hand experience. Most of what I say will apply equally well, I think, to all creative labor, and all activities of discovery. It will apply at least for what is known as ‘intellectual’ work, which is done mostly ‘in one’s head’, and to writing. Work of this sort is distinguished by the hatching out and by the blossoming of our understanding of certain things which we are interrogating.
To take an example in the other direction, passionate love is, also, driven by the quest for discovery. It provides us with a certain kind of understanding known as ‘carnal’ which also restores itself, blossoms forth and grows in depth. These two impulses -that which animates the mathematician at his desk ( let’s say), and that which impels the lover towards the loved one—are much more closely linked than is commonly believed, or, let us say, people are inclined to want to believe. It is my wish that these pages of Récoltes et Semailles will make its reader aware of this connection, in his own work and in his daily life.
Most of the time in the course of this excursion we will be concerned with mathematics itself, properly speaking. I will be saying almost nothing about the context in which this work takes place, or of the motivations of individuals which lie outside the work itself. This runs the risk of giving me, or the mathematician or scientist in general, a somewhat flattering image, and for that reason distorted- the sort of thing one sees in speaking of the “grand passion” of the scientist, without restrictions. That is to say, something along the lines of the grandiose “Myth of Science” ( with a capital S if you please!); the heroic “myth of Prometheus” which writers have so often indulged in ( and continue to do so) , for better or worse. Only the historians, and then not always, have been able to resist the seductions of this myth. The truth of the matter is that it is universally the case that, in the real motives of the scientist, of which he himself is often unaware in his work, vanity and ambition will play as large a role as they do in all other professions. The forms that these assume can be in turn subtle or grotesque, depending on the individual. Nor do I exempt myself. Anyone who reads this testimonial will have to agree with me.
It is also the case that the most totally consuming ambition is powerless to make or to demonstrate the simplest mathematical discovery—even as it is powerless ( for example) to “score” ( in the vulgar sense) . Whether one is male or female, that which allows one to ‘score’ is not ambition, the desire to shine, to exhibit one’s prowess, sexual in this case. Quite the contrary!
What brings success in this case is the acute perception of the presence of something strong, very real and at the same time very delicate. Perhaps one can call it “beauty”, in its thousand-fold aspects. That someone is ambitious doesn’t mean that one cannot also feel the presence of beauty in them; but it is not the attribute of ambition which evokes this feeling.…
The first man to discover and master fire was just like you and me. He was neither a hero nor a demi-god. Once again like you and me he had experienced the sting of anguish, and applied the poultice of vanity to anaesthetize that sting. But, at the moment at which he first “knew” fire he had neither fear nor vanity. That is the truth at the heart of all heroic myth. The myth itself becomes insipid, nothing but a drug, when it is used to conceal the true nature of things.
I feel like this text presents a straw man of ambition. You need curiosity too; ambition without it is boring; but I think there is a quality that keeps people on track through the non-fun parts of exploring their art. It’s not ambition itself that leads to mathematical discovery, but it’s something like ambition that might lead someone to sit down, day after day, with books of math and paper and a pencil, and work hard learning new concepts...some days it might be the height of fun, some days they might rather go drinking with their friends, but at the end, any discoveries born of curiosity also depended on those many hours spent learning basic concepts.
Of course, that quality might not be what most people call ambition. It could be called “drive” or even “conscientiousness”. It’s possible to work hard for many years just out of habit, because you think it’s virtuous to work hard for its own sake (I used to be more this type)...but the strategic application of hard work to problems you think are both important and solvable by you is something I don’t think is covered by “curiosity” or “conscientiousness.”
I have a cluster of intuitions on this point that are difficult to articulate, but I’ll try:
I agree that in order to achieve things, one has to keep working through the non-fun parts.
My impressions of the best mathematicians is that the situation is not so much that they force themselves to work through the non-fun parts as much as that they’re so obsessed by what they’re working on that they don’t have a choice not to do it. This may be the primary quality that differentiates them from other mathematicians of comparable IQ, education, etc. The physiology here may be similar to that of drug addiction.
Maybe it’s helpful to consider the following analogy. A parent will tend to his or her newborn even when it’s unpleasant. But this doesn’t come from ambition as much as instinct.
It’s important to note that much of scientific and other progress has been unexpected. Isaac Newton spend the industrial revolution by many years, but he didn’t set out to do so: he set out to understand the world. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was probably motivated by a desire to understand the world rather than by a desire to cure disease.
I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one’s instincts without reflections. But I don’t think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people’s social impact.
I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one’s instincts without reflections.
How did you arrive at these numbers, out of curiosity?
One thing that I see as relevant is the impact of funding bed net distribution relative to the impact of usual work, and another thing that I see as relevant is the amount of social value that founding Google produced relative to the founders’ earnings. But these things don’t address small probability edge cases in which specific targeted interventions turn out to be many orders of magnitude more important than most activity.
But I don’t think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people’s social impact.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
However, the mindset of “some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they’re the ones who will change the world” doesn’t seem helpful if you’re not one of those people. Which I’m pretty sure I’m not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction). What are you supposed to do if you don’t feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
To take an example in the other direction, passionate love is, also, driven by the quest for discovery. It provides us with a certain kind of understanding known as ‘carnal’ which also restores itself, blossoms forth and grows in depth.
I don’t know what this feeling is. I’m quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that “curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love” is really unhelpful.
I hope I haven’t alienated you — it wasn’t my intention.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
It depends how broad you’re defining random chance / luck, but some predictive factors (which can be positive or negative depending how pronounced they are, and on the context, and which have effect sizes that depend on the context) are
It’s possible to change on some of these dimensions, or change their significance in one’s life.
However, the mindset of “some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they’re the ones who will change the world” doesn’t seem helpful if you’re not one of those people.
I need to be more careful about how I frame these points. I recognize that my original framing may have come across as elitist and/or having in-group/out-group connotations.
My reason for focusing on outliers is that I think that the factors relevant to success emerge in their most vivid forms in these cases. This is similar to how John Oldham and Lois Morris categorize personality types according to personality disorders. By examining people who vividly exemplify some of one’s characteristics, one can understand oneself better.
Which I’m pretty sure I’m not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction).
These things aren’t necessarily immutable.
What are you supposed to do if you don’t feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I don’t know what this feeling is. I’m quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that “curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love” is really unhelpful.
I didn’t know this before.
I think that there’s also overlap with spiritual experiences, which you’ve described yourself as having had. When I first understood class field theory and complex multiplication it induced a several week long state of altered consciousness. I felt a sense of great inner peace, and even the most mundane objects around me seemed to me very beautiful.
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I’ve done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual’s control is helpful.
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways. On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
I think a big part of “having ambitions” (as opposed to “being ambitious”) is the HMPOR concept of “responsability.” You look at a situation and think “this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done.” And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn’t used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don’t always act accordingly.
I think that there’s also overlap with spiritual experiences
Oh! That’s what he’s talking about! I totally know that feeling. I’ve even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I’ve done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual’s control is helpful.
But learning about the factors that drive success in general is a sort of education, and one that I’ve found to have been helpful for my own personal development (though I recognize that my introspection may be faulty, and that my own situation may not generalize).
In particular, it’s relevant to understanding one’s comparative advantage. For example, I recently learned that my fluid intelligence lower than that of the average person in my peer groups, and that my ability to develop crystalized intelligence is probably higher than that of the average person in my peer groups. This suggests that I should work in a field where crystalized intelligence is more important to success than fluid intelligence is.
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways.
Would you describe yourself as basically utilitarian in philosophical outlook? The degree to which you’re cause agnostic makes a difference in what’s optimal.
On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
“I think that’s partly what interests me in people, that we don’t just wish to feed and sleep and reproduce then die like cows or sheep. Even if they’re gangsters, they seem to want to tell themselves they’re good gangsters and they’re loyal gangsters, they’ve fulfilled their ‘gangstership’ well. We do seem to have this moral sense, however it’s applied, whatever we think. We don’t seem satisfied, unless we can tell ourselves by some criteria that we have done it well and we haven’t wasted it and we’ve contributed well. So that is one of the things, I think, that distinguishes human beings, as far as I can see.” — Kazuo Ishiguro
I think a big part of “having ambitions” (as opposed to “being ambitious”) is the HMPOR concept of “responsability.” You look at a situation and think “this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done.” And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn’t used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don’t always act accordingly.
To clarify where I’m coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It’s often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
I recognize that my prior failure mode may not be relevant to your situation – just raising it as a point for consideration.
Oh! That’s what he’s talking about! I totally know that feeling. I’ve even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
His analogy with romantic passion is imperfect — I would guess that more than anything else, he was trying to highlight the intensity of the emotion involved (in order to contrast it with popular conceptions of mathematical activity). Religious experience may be as close or closer. But religious experience probably doesn’t come with the same obsessive “drive” that romantic passion does.
Here is another quotation of his that might clarify what he was trying to say:
The year 1955 marked a critical departure in my work in mathematics: that of my passage from “analysis” to “geometry”. I well recall the power of my emotional response ( very subjective naturally); it was as if I’d fled the harsh arid steppes to find myself suddenly transported to a kind of “promised land” of superabundant richness, multiplying out to infinity wherever I placed my hand in it, either to search or to gather… This impression, of overwhelming riches has continued to be confirmed and grow in substance and depth down to the present day. The phrase “superabundant richness” has this nuance: it refers to the situation in which the impressions and sensations raised in us through encounter with something whose splendor, grandeur or beauty are out of the ordinary, are so great as to totally submerge us, to the point that the urge to express whatever we are feeling is obliterated.
To clarify where I’m coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It’s often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
The fact that this has been your main flawed-heuristic-to-overcome is probably the source of almost all of our disagreement. My flawed heuristic was very close to the opposite; I was exposed to career-self-help books like “What Color is your Parachute” in my early teens, to the concepts of SMART goals, et cetera. I wouldn’t have called it ‘comparative advantage’, but this was basically my reasoning for not going into physics–I didn’t think I was good enough at math to be more than mediocre. I trained my brain to reject goals that weren’t specific, measurable, clearly attainable, etc–it wasn’t even that I thought about them and chose not to pursue them, but I didn’t think they were goals at all. Daydreams, maybe, but goals were things where you could see every step of the way and then walk out and achieve it, without too much uncertainty introduced by the behaviour of other people.
This model helped me–I am quite good at “taskifying” goals, making them specific and measurable and all the rest, and maybe as a consequence, I’m good at doing them. But it limits the goals I can work on, and I’ve started to notice that people in real life can (sometimes) accomplish goals that start out big and vague and impossible-seeming...even if they only accomplish 1/10th of the goals they attempt, that might still be more total accomplishments than the person who started with easy achievable goals. Thus I should try it.
I think the words you want are “intrinsic” vs “extrinsic” motivation.
“Intrinsic motivation” is when you do something for it’s own sake, when the action is the goal.
“Extrinsic motivation” is when you do something in service of another goal.
It’s complicated, right? A conscientious person might actually enjoy the process of cleaning their room...they might get a little reward buzz out of doing that little task, because they know it’s one more thing off the checklist. To oversimplify neuroscience (but this actually isn’t as oversimplified as you might think), the nice thing about the dopaminergic system is that it can be trained to make extrinsically rewarding activities become intrinsically rewarding. I think much of what we perceive as “driven, motivated” is the ability to make extrinsic rewarding activity intrinsically rewarding.
Ambition sets the height of the intrinsically rewarding goals, whatever they may be. Would you enjoy lots of money? Would you enjoy power? Would you enjoy helping people?
Motivation helps you to assign intrinsic reward to the activities which are in service of your goals. Perhaps yet another trait (Willpower? Grit? Perseverance?) enables you to power through it anyway, even if you are unable to find anything intrinsically rewarding about it.
Curiosity and Creative impulses are different from both of these things in that they are themselves forms of intrinsic motivation, and neither set nor serve any higher goal. We do those things because it feels good to satisfy, and it hurts to not satisfy it. It’s fun—the same way that drinking with friends is fun. It’s an impulse—the rewards are intrinsic, immediate, and it would actually require willpower not to do it.
So I’ve got impulses which are creative and curious—I spend my time learning because it is fun and I’d keep doing it even if nothing would ever come of it. I can visualize a world where those impulses are satisfied to a greater extent than they currently are, and want to bring about that world—that’s an ambition. There are many college courses I don’t enjoy, but I try to grit my teeth and work through them in the service of my ambition. That is willpower—it’s in short supply, but it is present. I unfortunately don’t have any motivation, but I imagine it would consist of a feeling of satisfaction in response to good grades, a feeling of contentment when my work is done, and things of that nature.
You said you wanted to be a nurse, so I’m assuming (correct me otherwise?) that “helping people” is your thing. Is helping people your ambition or your impulse or both?
Impulse form: Helping people feels good and knowing pain exists feels bad, so you are intrinsically motivated to do help.
Ambition form: You envision a world where people are helped and feel a desire to manipulate your environment such as to bring about that world.
EDIT: Or, I guess “neither” is an option too—the entire thing could be a means to some yet more abstract end.
I’ve known a few people who choose professions because of social obligation, or some abstract sense that they “should” be doing the thing in question. People who manage to be successful with this set of priorities generally have a lot of either motivation or gritty willpower.
For the “social pressure’ variety, the ambition or impulse is to please some other set of people.
The “self acceptance” variety can often be very hard on themselves when they fail—for them, the ambition or impulse is the achievement of self-respect and self-worth. The whole thing is a quest to be the sort of person they would admire.
On being a nurse: helping people is more an impulse than an ambition now. Bedside nursing is soooo instantly-gratifying, and fulfills the needs of some deep, primitive, social-grooming-craving part of my emotional system, I don’t know if it was different four years ago; I don’t trust myself to perfectly remember my past motivations. I think that for a long time “ambitions” had very little power to move me, because of the part of my brain that was convinced they were immoral and/or led to doom.
I do have ambitions to help people in strategic ways (nursing might be a strategic way, but it might not be), and hopefully they will gain more power to affect my actions in the future.
The nice thing about the impulse form is that it allows you to succeed at what you do despite being lazy and not having much in the way of motivation or willpower.
hopefully they will gain more power to affect my actions in the future.
Strategically fulfill your impulses. If I just wanted science to be done in the abstract, I’d lobby for funding to science or donate money to research. I, personally want to do science, and so I strategically plan my life so as to increase my ability to fulfill that impulse. It’s an ambition to do science, but I’d never be able to motivate myself if I took the route of going into finance and donating my large income to research (unless I intrinsically enjoyed finance—insufficient data to know),
I’m saying that ambition needs a carrot at the end of the pole. The carrot is the instant gratification of the act of being helpful. Strategically make it so your ability to carry out this “act of being helpful” is increased, so that you can squeeze more gratification out of it. Without the carrot, ambition will fail due to lack of willpower and motivation. So if you are “strategically helping people”, the end goal of the strategy must ultimately include something that furthers your own enjoyment and gratification, something you know you’ll actually feel good about.
Brains are our masters, with only 2 percent of our body weight, they take 20 percent of the oxygen resources of our bodies; you cannot resist their commands. You become a mathematician, a slave of this insatiable hunger of your brain, of everybody’s brain, for making structures of everything that goes into it.
Thanks for the post.
Curiosity may play a greater role in people’s capacity to achieve things than ambition does. Quoting Alexender Grothendieck’s Recoltes et Semailles:
I feel like this text presents a straw man of ambition. You need curiosity too; ambition without it is boring; but I think there is a quality that keeps people on track through the non-fun parts of exploring their art. It’s not ambition itself that leads to mathematical discovery, but it’s something like ambition that might lead someone to sit down, day after day, with books of math and paper and a pencil, and work hard learning new concepts...some days it might be the height of fun, some days they might rather go drinking with their friends, but at the end, any discoveries born of curiosity also depended on those many hours spent learning basic concepts.
Of course, that quality might not be what most people call ambition. It could be called “drive” or even “conscientiousness”. It’s possible to work hard for many years just out of habit, because you think it’s virtuous to work hard for its own sake (I used to be more this type)...but the strategic application of hard work to problems you think are both important and solvable by you is something I don’t think is covered by “curiosity” or “conscientiousness.”
I have a cluster of intuitions on this point that are difficult to articulate, but I’ll try:
I agree that in order to achieve things, one has to keep working through the non-fun parts.
My impressions of the best mathematicians is that the situation is not so much that they force themselves to work through the non-fun parts as much as that they’re so obsessed by what they’re working on that they don’t have a choice not to do it. This may be the primary quality that differentiates them from other mathematicians of comparable IQ, education, etc. The physiology here may be similar to that of drug addiction.
Maybe it’s helpful to consider the following analogy. A parent will tend to his or her newborn even when it’s unpleasant. But this doesn’t come from ambition as much as instinct.
It’s important to note that much of scientific and other progress has been unexpected. Isaac Newton spend the industrial revolution by many years, but he didn’t set out to do so: he set out to understand the world. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was probably motivated by a desire to understand the world rather than by a desire to cure disease.
I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one’s instincts without reflections. But I don’t think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people’s social impact.
How did you arrive at these numbers, out of curiosity?
I don’t have a tight argument.
One thing that I see as relevant is the impact of funding bed net distribution relative to the impact of usual work, and another thing that I see as relevant is the amount of social value that founding Google produced relative to the founders’ earnings. But these things don’t address small probability edge cases in which specific targeted interventions turn out to be many orders of magnitude more important than most activity.
I hope to write about this more in the future.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
However, the mindset of “some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they’re the ones who will change the world” doesn’t seem helpful if you’re not one of those people. Which I’m pretty sure I’m not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction). What are you supposed to do if you don’t feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
I don’t know what this feeling is. I’m quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that “curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love” is really unhelpful.
I hope I haven’t alienated you — it wasn’t my intention.
It depends how broad you’re defining random chance / luck, but some predictive factors (which can be positive or negative depending how pronounced they are, and on the context, and which have effect sizes that depend on the context) are
IQ
Big Five personality traits.
Early childhood environment
Educational background
Peer group
Susceptibility to herd mentality or lack thereof
Meta-cognition
Genuine humility or lack thereof
It’s possible to change on some of these dimensions, or change their significance in one’s life.
I need to be more careful about how I frame these points. I recognize that my original framing may have come across as elitist and/or having in-group/out-group connotations.
My reason for focusing on outliers is that I think that the factors relevant to success emerge in their most vivid forms in these cases. This is similar to how John Oldham and Lois Morris categorize personality types according to personality disorders. By examining people who vividly exemplify some of one’s characteristics, one can understand oneself better.
These things aren’t necessarily immutable.
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I didn’t know this before.
I think that there’s also overlap with spiritual experiences, which you’ve described yourself as having had. When I first understood class field theory and complex multiplication it induced a several week long state of altered consciousness. I felt a sense of great inner peace, and even the most mundane objects around me seemed to me very beautiful.
I didn’t feel alienated, don’t worry.
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I’ve done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual’s control is helpful.
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways. On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
I think a big part of “having ambitions” (as opposed to “being ambitious”) is the HMPOR concept of “responsability.” You look at a situation and think “this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done.” And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn’t used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don’t always act accordingly.
Oh! That’s what he’s talking about! I totally know that feeling. I’ve even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
But learning about the factors that drive success in general is a sort of education, and one that I’ve found to have been helpful for my own personal development (though I recognize that my introspection may be faulty, and that my own situation may not generalize).
In particular, it’s relevant to understanding one’s comparative advantage. For example, I recently learned that my fluid intelligence lower than that of the average person in my peer groups, and that my ability to develop crystalized intelligence is probably higher than that of the average person in my peer groups. This suggests that I should work in a field where crystalized intelligence is more important to success than fluid intelligence is.
Would you describe yourself as basically utilitarian in philosophical outlook? The degree to which you’re cause agnostic makes a difference in what’s optimal.
“I think that’s partly what interests me in people, that we don’t just wish to feed and sleep and reproduce then die like cows or sheep. Even if they’re gangsters, they seem to want to tell themselves they’re good gangsters and they’re loyal gangsters, they’ve fulfilled their ‘gangstership’ well. We do seem to have this moral sense, however it’s applied, whatever we think. We don’t seem satisfied, unless we can tell ourselves by some criteria that we have done it well and we haven’t wasted it and we’ve contributed well. So that is one of the things, I think, that distinguishes human beings, as far as I can see.” — Kazuo Ishiguro
To clarify where I’m coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It’s often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
I recognize that my prior failure mode may not be relevant to your situation – just raising it as a point for consideration.
His analogy with romantic passion is imperfect — I would guess that more than anything else, he was trying to highlight the intensity of the emotion involved (in order to contrast it with popular conceptions of mathematical activity). Religious experience may be as close or closer. But religious experience probably doesn’t come with the same obsessive “drive” that romantic passion does.
Here is another quotation of his that might clarify what he was trying to say:
The fact that this has been your main flawed-heuristic-to-overcome is probably the source of almost all of our disagreement. My flawed heuristic was very close to the opposite; I was exposed to career-self-help books like “What Color is your Parachute” in my early teens, to the concepts of SMART goals, et cetera. I wouldn’t have called it ‘comparative advantage’, but this was basically my reasoning for not going into physics–I didn’t think I was good enough at math to be more than mediocre. I trained my brain to reject goals that weren’t specific, measurable, clearly attainable, etc–it wasn’t even that I thought about them and chose not to pursue them, but I didn’t think they were goals at all. Daydreams, maybe, but goals were things where you could see every step of the way and then walk out and achieve it, without too much uncertainty introduced by the behaviour of other people.
This model helped me–I am quite good at “taskifying” goals, making them specific and measurable and all the rest, and maybe as a consequence, I’m good at doing them. But it limits the goals I can work on, and I’ve started to notice that people in real life can (sometimes) accomplish goals that start out big and vague and impossible-seeming...even if they only accomplish 1/10th of the goals they attempt, that might still be more total accomplishments than the person who started with easy achievable goals. Thus I should try it.
Typo: s/spend/sped/
I think the words you want are “intrinsic” vs “extrinsic” motivation.
“Intrinsic motivation” is when you do something for it’s own sake, when the action is the goal.
“Extrinsic motivation” is when you do something in service of another goal.
It’s complicated, right? A conscientious person might actually enjoy the process of cleaning their room...they might get a little reward buzz out of doing that little task, because they know it’s one more thing off the checklist. To oversimplify neuroscience (but this actually isn’t as oversimplified as you might think), the nice thing about the dopaminergic system is that it can be trained to make extrinsically rewarding activities become intrinsically rewarding. I think much of what we perceive as “driven, motivated” is the ability to make extrinsic rewarding activity intrinsically rewarding.
Ambition sets the height of the intrinsically rewarding goals, whatever they may be. Would you enjoy lots of money? Would you enjoy power? Would you enjoy helping people?
Motivation helps you to assign intrinsic reward to the activities which are in service of your goals. Perhaps yet another trait (Willpower? Grit? Perseverance?) enables you to power through it anyway, even if you are unable to find anything intrinsically rewarding about it.
Curiosity and Creative impulses are different from both of these things in that they are themselves forms of intrinsic motivation, and neither set nor serve any higher goal. We do those things because it feels good to satisfy, and it hurts to not satisfy it. It’s fun—the same way that drinking with friends is fun. It’s an impulse—the rewards are intrinsic, immediate, and it would actually require willpower not to do it.
So I’ve got impulses which are creative and curious—I spend my time learning because it is fun and I’d keep doing it even if nothing would ever come of it. I can visualize a world where those impulses are satisfied to a greater extent than they currently are, and want to bring about that world—that’s an ambition. There are many college courses I don’t enjoy, but I try to grit my teeth and work through them in the service of my ambition. That is willpower—it’s in short supply, but it is present. I unfortunately don’t have any motivation, but I imagine it would consist of a feeling of satisfaction in response to good grades, a feeling of contentment when my work is done, and things of that nature.
You said you wanted to be a nurse, so I’m assuming (correct me otherwise?) that “helping people” is your thing. Is helping people your ambition or your impulse or both?
Impulse form: Helping people feels good and knowing pain exists feels bad, so you are intrinsically motivated to do help.
Ambition form: You envision a world where people are helped and feel a desire to manipulate your environment such as to bring about that world.
EDIT: Or, I guess “neither” is an option too—the entire thing could be a means to some yet more abstract end.
I’ve known a few people who choose professions because of social obligation, or some abstract sense that they “should” be doing the thing in question. People who manage to be successful with this set of priorities generally have a lot of either motivation or gritty willpower.
For the “social pressure’ variety, the ambition or impulse is to please some other set of people.
The “self acceptance” variety can often be very hard on themselves when they fail—for them, the ambition or impulse is the achievement of self-respect and self-worth. The whole thing is a quest to be the sort of person they would admire.
Awesome breakdown! Thank you!
On being a nurse: helping people is more an impulse than an ambition now. Bedside nursing is soooo instantly-gratifying, and fulfills the needs of some deep, primitive, social-grooming-craving part of my emotional system, I don’t know if it was different four years ago; I don’t trust myself to perfectly remember my past motivations. I think that for a long time “ambitions” had very little power to move me, because of the part of my brain that was convinced they were immoral and/or led to doom.
I do have ambitions to help people in strategic ways (nursing might be a strategic way, but it might not be), and hopefully they will gain more power to affect my actions in the future.
The nice thing about the impulse form is that it allows you to succeed at what you do despite being lazy and not having much in the way of motivation or willpower.
Strategically fulfill your impulses. If I just wanted science to be done in the abstract, I’d lobby for funding to science or donate money to research. I, personally want to do science, and so I strategically plan my life so as to increase my ability to fulfill that impulse. It’s an ambition to do science, but I’d never be able to motivate myself if I took the route of going into finance and donating my large income to research (unless I intrinsically enjoyed finance—insufficient data to know),
I’m saying that ambition needs a carrot at the end of the pole. The carrot is the instant gratification of the act of being helpful. Strategically make it so your ability to carry out this “act of being helpful” is increased, so that you can squeeze more gratification out of it. Without the carrot, ambition will fail due to lack of willpower and motivation. So if you are “strategically helping people”, the end goal of the strategy must ultimately include something that furthers your own enjoyment and gratification, something you know you’ll actually feel good about.
On my second point:
Mikhail Gromov